This invention relates to machinery for transporting vessels, especially glass bottles, in a bottling plant, for example.
There are various kinds of bottle transporting apparatus wherein bottles stand upright on the upper run of an endless hinge-band-chain or a group of such chains in parallel. The power-driven translating chains may be used to move vessels such as bottles between individual machines of a racking-plant or a bottling-plant. During transport, the stream of vessels is frequently deflected, accelerated, retarded, divided into groups and brought together. At places along the conveyor at which the foregoing events occur, the glass vessels have a tendency to pack or crowd and collide with each other which, particularly when empty bottles are being transported, results in development of a high noise level, caused by the continuous striking of the bottles against each other.
In some prior art bottle transporting apparatus, the places where colliding of the bottles and development of high noise levels is likely to occur are covered with a hood that is lined with an acoustic absorber. Although use of hoods lowers ambient noise level, observation and access of the bottles for overcoming disturbances becomes cumbersome and time-consuming.